A Red Death (18 page)

The center room was carpeted in white. The dead man reclined on a white leather couch. Towne’s empty gaze lay on the modern fireplace that was shielded by a golden screen.

Everything was clean and made up except in a corner by the door; there was a pile of vomit. The murderer had eaten cole slaw and meatloaf for lunch. The strong smell of alcohol emanated from that corner.

When I looked out of the kitchen window I saw the stairs where I’d stood not fifteen minutes before; I remembered the crackle and sigh. I wondered if it could have been a volley of small-caliber shots. Could have been.

I went back to the lovers, if that’s what you could call them.

It looked more like the convenience that we GIs enjoyed across Europe when there wasn’t much time or money. She was still fully dressed, she even wore her shoes. It was the same woman I had seen him with in the basement.

Then I wondered who would be investigating the case. Magnolia Street wasn’t that far away.

While I considered the telephone and the east Texas swamps, Chaim entered.

“What’s this?” he stammered.

“Dead.”

“Who?” he asked back. In real life you don’t need very much language.

“I dunno, man. Winona was comin’ down an’ yellin’ an’ here they was.”

“She kill them?”

“You wanna call the police, Chaim?”

“Where?” he asked. I was happy that he didn’t ask why.

I pointed out the phone and looked around while he dialed. When he’d finished talking to the police dispatcher I asked him if he’d seen anything strange downstairs. He said no. Then I asked if he’d seen anyone other than me. He said that he saw one of the younger deacons, Robert Williams, earlier in the day.

The uniformed police came in around ten minutes. They called in the same report that Chaim had made, then they separated us and began asking questions.

Winona was led upstairs. She sat on the floor just outside the apartment crying and mumbling about blood.

My cop asked if Winona had known the minister. I said that I didn’t know what their relationship was, and he got suspicious.

“You don’t know her? Then how do you know her name?”

“I know her to say hello, I just don’t know if she knew the minister. I mean, she’s on the church council, so she knew him, but I don’t know what they had to do with each other.”

“How long was she up there with him?”

“Beats me.”

He started pacing and clenching his fists. He was a fat man with a red face and bright blue eyes. He was taller than I was, and he had a habit of talking to himself.

“He knows her name,” he said. “But after that he’s stupid.”

I said, “I was down in the basement,” but he didn’t even hear it.

He went, “Something wrong with that. Yes, something wrong.”

Then he asked me, “You know where she lives?”

“No.”

That started him pacing again.

“Boy’s fooling around here, hiding something. Yeah, hiding something.”

It was said that there were still crocodiles deep in the Texas swamps. I would have preferred a cuddly reptile right then.

“Fine,” someone said from the door.

The crazy policeman turned as if someone had called him. It was Andrew Reedy.

“What’s happening here?” Reedy asked.

“Two spooks blasted and salt-and-pepper here acting like it was God done it. Girl out in the hall found them.”

Quinten Naylor came in behind Reedy. I don’t know if he heard what the crazy cop had said but you could see that there was no love lost between the two. They didn’t even acknowledge each other.

“Well, well, well,” Reedy was saying. “Here you are again, Mr. Rawlins. Were they evicting these two?”

“That’s the minister of the church on the couch. I don’t know the girl.”

I could see the mood shift in Reedy’s face. A dead minister was a political problem, no matter what color he was.

“And why were you here?”

“Just workin’ downstairs, that’s all.”

“Working?” Naylor said. “People always turn up dead when you’re working?”

“No sir.”

“Did you know the minister?”

“To speak to, that’s all.”

“You a member of this church?”

“Yes sir.”

Naylor turned his head to the uniforms.

“Cover them up,” he said. “Don’t you guys know procedure?”

The fat cop made like he was going to go at Naylor but Reedy grabbed him by the arm and whispered to him. Then the uniforms left with the fat cop swaggering through the door.

On the way out the fat one said to Naylor, “Don’t worry, son, lotsa killin’s on nigger patrol. Wait till you see how the nigger bitches cut up on each other.” Then he was gone.

“I’ll kill that son of a bitch,” Naylor said.

Reedy didn’t say anything. He’d gone up to the bedroom and gotten sheets to cover the dead.

“What about you?” Naylor asked Chaim.

“I am Wenzler, officer. Easy and I are working in the basement and we hear the screams. He runs up, I come in, and poor Dr. Towne was here, and the girl. It’s terrible.”

“Mr. Rawlins work for you?”

“Together,” Chaim said. “We do charity for the church.”

“And you were down there when you heard the screams?”

“Yes.”

“What about shots?”

“No shots, just screams. Weak little screams like she was far away, in a hole.”

“Let’s take ’em all down and get statements, Quint,” Reedy said. “I’ll call for more uniforms and we’ll take ’em. I’ll call the ambulance and the coroner, too.”

— 23 —

I
HADN’T BEEN TO the Seventy-seventh Street station for questioning in many years. It looked older in the fifties but it smelled the same. A sour odor that wasn’t anything exactly.

It wasn’t living and it wasn’t dead, it wasn’t food and it wasn’t excrement. It wasn’t anything I knew, but it was wrong, as wrong as the smells in Poinsettia’s apartment.

The last time I was taken there I had been under arrest and the police put me in a raw-walled room that was made for questioning prisoners. The kind of questioning that was punctuated by fists and shoes. This time, though, they sat me at a desk with Quinten Naylor. He had a blue-and-white form in front of him and he asked me questions.

“Name?”

“Ezekiel Porterhouse Rawlins,” I answered.

“Date of birth.”

“Let’s see now,” I said. “That would be November third, nineteen hundred and twenty.”

“Height.”

“Close to six feet, almost six-one.”

“Weight.”

“One eighty-five, except at Christmas. Then I’m about one ninety.”

He asked more questions like that and I answered freely. I trusted a Negro, I don’t know why. I’d been beaten, robbed, shot at, and generally mistreated by more colored brothers than I’d ever been by whites, but I trusted a black man before I’d even think about a white one. That’s just the way things were for me.

“Okay, Ezekiel, tell me about Poinsettia, Reverend Towne, and that woman.”

“They all dead, man. Dead as mackerel.”

“Who killed them?”

He had an educated way of talking. I could have talked like him if I’d wanted to, but I never did like it when a man stopped using the language of his upbringing. If you were to talk like a white man you might forget who you were.

“I’ont know, man. Poinsettia kilt herself, right?”

“Autopsy report on her will be in this evening. You got something to say about it now?”

“They ain’t got to that yet?” I was really surprised.

“The coroner’s working a little hard these days, Mr. Rawlins. There was that bus accident on San Remo Street and the fire in Santa Monica. Up until now we were only half sure that this was even a case,” Quinten said. “He’s been butt-high in corpses, but your turn is coming up.”

“I don’t know nuthin’, man. I know the minister and the girl was murdered ’cause I seen the blood. I’ont know who killed ’em an’ if I get my way I ain’t gonna know. Murder ain’t got nuthin’ t’do wit’ me.”

“That’s not how I hear it.”

“How’s that?”

“I hear that there were quite a few murders that you were intimate with a few years ago. Your testimony put away one of the killers.”

“That’s right! Not me.” I pointed at my chest. “Somebody else did a killin’ an’ I told the law. If I knew today I’d tell you now. But I was dumb-assed in the basement, movin’ some clothes, when I heard Winona yell. I went up to help but I could see that they was beyond what I could do.”

“You think Winona did it?”

“Beats me.”

“You see anybody else around?”

“No,” I said. Chaim had mentioned Robert Williams, but I hadn’t seen him.

“Nobody?”

“I seen Chaim, an’ Chaim seen me. That’s it.”

“Where were you before you got to work?”

“I was at breakfast, with a friend’a mines.”

“Who was that?”

“Her name was Shirley.”

“Shirley what?”

“I don’t know the girl’s last name but I know where she lives.”

“How long were you at the church before you went down to the basement?”

“I went right down.”

So we started from the top again. And again.

One time he asked me if I heard the shots.

“Shots?”

“Yeah,” he answered gruffly. “Shots.”

“They were shot?”

“What did you think?”

“I’ont know, man, they coulda been stabbed fo’all I know.”

That was it for Officer Naylor. He got up and left in disgust. A few minutes later he returned and told me I could go. Chaim and Winona had been gone for hours. The police didn’t suspect them. Winona was too hysterical to be faking it, and nobody knew that Chaim was part of the Red Terror.

I went out on the street and caught a bus down Central to the church, then I drove home. Nothing seemed quite right. Everything was off. It was strange enough that so much had happened. But now people were dying and still it didn’t make sense.

A
S IF TO PROVE MY FEARS, Mouse was on my swinging sofa on the front porch, drinking whiskey. I could smell him from ten feet away.

He was usually a natty dresser. He wore silk and cashmere as another man might wear cotton. Women dressed him and then took him out to show the world what they had.

He told me once that a woman had the pockets in his pants taken out and replaced them with satin so that she could stroke him under the table, or at a show, the way she did at home.

But it wasn’t the smooth dresser I saw on my porch. He hadn’t shaved in days, and Mouse had that kind of sparse beard that looked ratty on a man. His clothes were soiled, his disposition was taciturn. And he was drunk. Not the one-night kind of drunk but a drunk that you can only get from days of booze.

“Hiya, Easy.”

“Mouse.”

I sat down next to him and all of a sudden I had the feeling that we were young men again, as if we’d never left Texas. I guess that’s what I was hoping for, simpler times.

“I ain’t got my gun, man,” Mouse said.

“No?”

“Naw.”

“How come?”

“Might kill somebody, Easy. Somebody I don’t wanna kill.”

“Whas wrong wit’ you, Ray? You sick?”

He laughed, hunching forward as if he were having a seizure.

“Yeah,” he said. “Sick. Sick t’ death of all this pain.”

“What pain is that?”

He looked into my eyes with a steely gray gaze. “You seen my boy?”

“Yeah, when Etta come she brought him.”

“He’s a beautiful boy, ain’t he?”

I nodded.

“He got big feet and a big mouf. Shit, that’s all you need in this world. That’s all you need.”

Mouse stopped talking, so I said, “He’s a great boy. Strong, and he’s smart too.”

“He’s the devil hisself,” Mouse whispered to his left arm.

“What’s that you said?”

“Satan. Evil angel’a hell. You could tell the way his eyebrows goes up, makin’ like horns.”

“LaMarque kinda mischievous, but he ain’t bad, Raymond.”

“Satan in hell. Black cats and voodoo curse. You ’member Mama Jo?”

“Yeah.”

I’d never forget her.

Mouse had conned me into driving him, in a stolen car, to a small bayou town in eastern Texas called Pariah. We were barely in our twenties but Mouse’s true nature was already fully developed. He wanted a dowry his mother had promised him before she died. He was to marry EttaMae and he said, “I will get that money or Daddy Reese will be dead.” Reese was Mouse’s stepfather.

But before we ever got to Pariah, Mouse had me drive to a place out in the middle of the swamplands. There we came to a house hidden on all sides by pear trees that doubled as pillars. And in that house lived the country witch, Mama Jo. She was a six-foot-six witch who lived by her wits out beyond the laws of normal men. She was twenty years older than I, and I was barely twenty. But she put a spell on me when we stayed with her for a night. Mouse was out planning the murder and Mama Jo had me by the hair. I was screaming love for her and talking out of my head. I remembered the smell of her breath: sweet chili and garlic, bitter wine and stale tobacco.